


ways to save the world

by Wildehack (tyleet)



Series: Author's Favorites [15]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Background Canonical Character Death, Canon-Typical Mental Health Issues, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Naomi Herne/Evan Lukas (background)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-09-12
Packaged: 2020-05-14 14:23:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 19,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19275127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tyleet/pseuds/Wildehack
Summary: “I left you,” Martin says softly.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> twodrunkcelestials asked for "JonMartin featuring both Jon and Martin belonging to the Lonely." 
> 
> This is that on a technicality, I'm afraid.

After Daisy shoots him point blank in the head and all that happens is that Jon Knows the history of the bullet's properties-–the powder, the lead, the wax, the copper: where it was sold, shaped, mined, where heat and rock and mineral first shoved it into existence in that deep vein in the earth, what tracery that vein made in the world, the hole in the earth that still misses the bullet, all the spaces that still can’t help but long for it, little bullet like a wound in the world–-  
  
after Jon spits the bullet out and forces his eyes open to find Daisy sobbing on the floor and Elias laughing, the taste of gunpowder alive on his tongue–-  
  
-–after that, the Archivist is quite certain there’s no stopping the ritual.   
  
Elias stops laughing, but it’s like they are one person rather than two, so Jon knows how glad he still is. Elias isn’t even in the Archives any longer-–he’s in a tower somewhere, looking down at London, somewhere very high where he can See everything-–but it hardly matters. The Archivist can see everything Elias does, and everything Basira and Melanie and even everything Daisy sees, even though that’s just earth and darkness now. Elias has trapped her in the memory of the Buried. A distant part of the Archivist thinks that he could free her with a thought, stop her from weeping at his feet, but the larger part of him knows it doesn’t matter.  
  
The Archivist can See everything, and there is only one thing he cares about: the shining crown that has finally materialized in the center of the web stretching from Eye to Archivist. All he has to do is is put it on his head, and the world will be changed.  
  
The Archivist steps forward to take up his destiny, and he finds something he did not expect.   
  
Something else has already picked up the crown.   
  
The Archivist doesn’t Know it, which is irritating. It is a thing claimed so thoroughly by absence that there’s nothing about it left to Know, just a lonely fog in the shape of a man.   
  
“Give me the crown,” the Archivist compels it, and he can see the thing flinch in his direction before steadying itself, becoming even less a person than it was before.   
  
“Ask nicely,” it says in a high-pitched way.   
  
This gives the Archivist pause. He isn’t worried; nothing can stop the ritual now. But he isn’t sure why it’s doing this, small nothing that it is. He is, by nature, curious.   
  
“Who are you?” he asks it, and it shudders again at the compulsion.   
  
“I used to be Martin Blackwood,” the thing answers him, but that’s meaningless. Martin Blackwood was an archival assistant consumed by the Lonely; pointless, hardly a threat.   
  
Except-–no, a distant part of him is insisting. It isn’t meaningless. Martin means something to him. He can’t remember what. “Give me the crown,” he says again, and this time the thing almost does it, jerking forward like it’s been hooked.   
  
“Don’t you-–don’t you remember what I am to you,” the thing that used to be Martin pants, still hanging onto the crown. It is clutching the metal so tightly that it’s bleeding, spikes digging into its skin.   
  
“Tell me,” the Archivist demands, annoyed that there is something he doesn’t know. “What are you to me?”   
  
“You love Martin Blackwood,” the thing tells him. “You love him and he left you alone.”   
  
This is true. Jon remembers this, sudden and aching. The Archivist feels a pang of unease, and Elias is sending his hounds to their door, is frantically feeling for the catch in Daisy Tonner’s mind that will get her up off the floor and have her pressing a gun to Martin Blackwood’s head.   
  
“You love me, Jon,” Martin says, and he sounds afraid. It is a lie-–no one can lie to him now, and a creature of the Lonely is not afraid of death-–but it still triggers something odd and animal in Jon’s brain, a hot familiar rush.   
  
“I do,” the Archivist says haltingly, because the Eye cannot lie to itself, either. Elsewhere, Elias is hissing that Peter will pay for this, and Basira has just buried a knife in Peter Lukas’s throat.   
  
“All right,” Martin says, and does something incredible. He puts down the crown, leaves it resting on the floor at his feet like it were nothing of particular importance. “Then touch me.”  
  
The Archivist takes a step forward, fully intending to pick up the crown, but the Lonely thing keeps speaking. On the other side of London, blood is bubbling out of Peter Lukas’s throat, and he’s laughing.   
  
“I left you,” Martin says softly. “I walked into the fog and I left you behind. I left you to die, but I missed you, right up until I couldn’t anymore. Haven’t you missed me, Jon?”   
  
He has.   
  
“Don’t you want to touch me?” Martin continues, cajoling.   
  
He does. True things cannot be denied here, in the room with the Watcher’s Crown.

“So touch me,” Martin says, and takes a step closer, gets between Jon and the Crown. “Come on, sweetheart. You can have me back.”   
  
“You’re lying,” the Archivist manages, but it’s only a breath. “I am never going to see Martin Blackwood again.”   
  
“Yeah,” the thing admits, and smiles a familiar, wistful smile at him. “You could say goodbye to him, though.”   
  
It hurts, Jon thinks, bringing a hand up blindly to the side of Martin’s face, stroking a thumb along his cheekbone. It hurts worse than being shot in the head.   
  
“That’s it,” Martin breathes, resting his hands on Jon’s chest, even as Daisy finally staggers to her feet. “Come on. Just like Sleeping Beauty.”   
  
“Goodbye, Martin,” Jon whispers, and gently kisses him.   
  
For a second it just feels like kissing anyone, and a traitorous little spark of hope lights in Jon’s chest.   
  
Then the fog rolls in.   
  
Dramatic things must be happening elsewhere, Jon is sure. Daisy might be firing her gun, or Elias screaming, Peter Lukas dying, a Great Eye shriveling into nothing, closed for the first time in three hundred years. He doesn’t know any of it for sure.   
  
Here the only thing is the fog, white and cold.   
  
Martin stops kissing him, and abruptly Jon is  _bereft_. 

There is no expression on his face as he drops his hands from Jon’s body. “Well,” he says. “That’s done.”   
  
Jon clears his throat, then clears it again, willing the lump in his throat to disappear. “Yes,” he says, and it comes out embarrassingly hoarse. “I suppose it is.”   
  
Martin’s face doesn’t change, but Jon gets the distinct impression that it is happy, feeding on his loss.   
  
Jon blinks hard and says: “You saved the world, I think. From, uh. From me.”   
  
“Yes,” Martin agrees.   
  
“And you didn’t kill me.”   
  
“That’s why he did this to himself in the first place,” Martin says pleasantly. “He was always trying to save you.”   
  
Jon’s throat hurts, terribly, constricting around nothing. “Thank you,” he says, when he can manage it.   
  
“Ta very much,” Martin says. He turns to go, and Jon doesn’t try to follow him. The Lonely has him now; no point in resisting. “Oh, Jon? Do you want to know the worst thing?”   
  
Jon didn’t know there was a worse thing, except for if he’d actually managed to wear the Watcher’s Crown. “What?”  
  
Martin’s face splits into something that could arguably be termed a smile. “Tomorrow morning I’m going to let Martin go,” he says kindly. “I’m never going to touch him again.” There’s a triumphant glitter in his eyes. “If you could only hear him, Jon. He’s going to spend his whole life trying to find you again. It’s going to kill him, if the Hunt doesn’t get him first.”   
  
Jon can’t breathe.   
  
“I’ll see you soon,” Martin murmurs, and then he’s gone.   
  
Jon is alone in the fog. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Martin wakes up on a stretcher outside the Institute.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it IS hard to be that mean to Martin, actually

Martin wakes up on a stretcher outside the Institute.

It’s the first time he’s really woken up in--god, he doesn’t know how long. Months? A year? He’s alone in his skin for the first time in ages, and less alone than he’s been since the Unknowing. The knowledge that if he spoke to someone they might _look_ at him, _see_ him, might really _hear_ him--he shudders hard, almost dislodging the oxygen mask strapped to his face.  
  
Emergency vehicles are flocked around the building; smoke is rich in the air, and his throat hurts.  He looks around wildly, and finds Daisy sitting next to him with a shock blanket wrapped around her shoulders, taking occasional puffs from an oxygen mask herself. There are other people from the Institute milling around, but no-one else from the Archives that he can see. He flails for Daisy’s shoulder, and she flinches at the touch.  
  
“That you?” she asks, giving him a suspicious glare, and he nods vigorously. That alone is enough to make him feel faint. “Good news, then,” she says. “The world isn’t ending and the fucking Magnus Archives are burning down.”  
  
He fumbles at the oxygen mask, pulling it down with a gasp until he can speak again. “Jon?” he rasps, even though he already knows the answer. Jon is--  
  
Jon is out of reach.  
  
But he doesn’t know if there was a body left behind or not, and if there was Martin needs to make sure it doesn’t get burned up. Can’t rescue Jon if there’s nowhere to put him.  
  
Daisy’s face is very cold. She shrugs.  
  
*  
  
The thing in Martin’s body had called Jon _sweetheart._ The _thing_ \--he knows exactly what it was. Who it was. The thing that lived in Peter Lukas had buried itself in Martin months earlier, and had just been biding its time, waiting for the right moment to take over.

 _Sweetheart,_ he’d said, like Martin would ever--but Jon’s face had crumpled slightly, and then he’d put his hand to Martin’s cheek, like they really had been--anything. To each other.

The worst part wasn’t the kiss, or the little sound Jon made in the back of his throat when Martin let him go, the way it took him a half-second to open his eyes after Martin stepped back.

It was Jon saying “Thank you” to the thing he _knew_ wasn’t Martin, the thing he knew was going to leave him there and feed however many years of terror he had left in him to its god.  
  
Martin can’t bear it.

*  
  
They don’t find a body, in the end. No one dies at all, at least according to the official police reports.  
  
The reckoning after the fire goes like this:  
  
Daisy has clearly had a quite terrible setback, but is physically fine. Melanie has a broken arm, Basira has severe frostbite in her right hand--courtesy of holding the knife that killed Peter Lukas--and Elias is in the hospital. Blinded.  
  
The Archivist is gone. Missing, officially.  
  
There are physical consequences for metaphorical wounds, after a ritual. Martin doesn’t know what to do with the fact that he’s totally fine, except that he can’t fall asleep because he keeps thinking about Jon wandering the empty world.  
  
He tries to visit Peter Lukas’s grave--he’d like to spit on it--but no amount of research gives him an address for Moorland House, and driving grimly through Kent doesn’t reveal any hidden cemeteries or mausoleums. Basira swears up and down that Peter is dead, and she has the blackened fingertips to prove it. Martin sort of pointlessly wishes he weren’t, because if Peter were alive he could--hurt him, threaten him, beg on his knees for him to let Jon go.

Instead, he visits Elias in hospital.  
  
Elias knows it’s him from the minute he steps through the hospital curtain, of course. “Martin,” he says, clipped, like he’s still sat behind his desk in the Institute, and not lying on a hospital cot with an IV in his arm and a thick bandage over his eyes. His head turns unerringly to where Martin is in the room. “How has unemployment been treating you?”  
  
“I don’t think you can fire me,” Martin says, crossing his arms over his chest. “My direct supervisor is dead, and no one’s hired a replacement.”

“You don’t belong to the Eye,” Elias says, the truth a brutal thing in his hands. “You’ve been given up by the Lonely. Frankly, I should have killed you years ago. An oversight.”

Martin swallows. “Do you know where Jon is?” he asks.

“I can’t see into the fog,” Elias says. “But I know where you trapped my Archivist, yes.”  
  
“It wasn’t me.”  
  
“It was,” Elias says, in that infuriatingly certain way he has. “The Lonely took you, but you let yourself be taken. You are complicit in Jon’s death, whether you’d like to admit it or not.”

Martin’s jaw works. “Saved the world from you, didn’t I,” he says, and Elias barks out a laugh.  
  
“Sure,” he says. “Well done, Martin. What a hero you are.”

“Listen,” Martin says, clenching his hand around the strap of his messenger bag, “You--I know you’re not what you look like.”  
  
“What do I look like,” Elias asks silkily.

He looks totally harmless. A middle-aged man who’s suffered a gruesome injury, a freak accident. He looks like he’s in pain, and speaking past it.  
  
“I said I know what you are,” Martin snaps. “I know a wounded animal’s more dangerous than a healthy one. You could twist my brain into a--a jelly, if you wanted. You could trap me in my worst memory with a thought, or just--shove me right into a coma. So why _haven’t_ you, Elias? Tell me that.”  

There’s an icy pause. “The fate Peter chose for you,” Elias says eventually, his voice growing even icier as Peter’s name passes over his tongue, “was wandering the earth uselessly in search of your lost love, until you died a pointless and very lonely death. I could leave you to it. I’m sure hope would be much crueler than any kind of vegetative state. Imagine the clues you and Jon might be able to leave for each other over the years.”  
  
Martin can feel his heart rate kicking up, wonders briefly if he has it in him to punch an invalid in the face.

“However,” Elias continues, and his voice drops slightly with cold rage. “I find myself...displeased...with the Forsaken. In addition, I am _missing my Archivist_ , and as I can’t appoint a new one until Jon dies, I would rather have him easy to hand while I remind my enemies of the consequences of betrayal. So.” With a deliberate motion, Elias holds out his hand, palm-up, hospital band not making the gesture seem anything less than a threat. “Come here, Martin.”  
  
Martin puts his hand in Elias’s, feeling sick about it--and of course that’s the right choice, because Elias instantly digs the long nail of his forefinger into the delicate skin at Martin’s wrist, hard enough to draw blood. Martin yelps and tries to draw back, but Elias won’t let him go.  
  
“Stop fussing,” Elias snaps, and grabs Martin’s wrist with his other hand, holding him still while he keeps--clawing him up, more efficiently than anyone should be able to with just fingernails. Martin’s wrist is burning, slick with blood, but the racing of his heart has nothing to do with the pain and everything to do with the design taking shape on his skin.  
  
It’s an eye, of course. Stylized, nearly like an Egyptian wadjet.

“There,” Elias says, and abruptly the eye is seared into him, a scar already and not a ragged cut at all.  
  
Martin gasps, and Elias lets him jump back and clutch his wrist.  
  
“Go and find Jon,” Elias says, his mouth twisting. “I’ll decide what to do with you once you have him.”

It isn’t until after Martin leaves, hope a physically painful thing in his chest, that he realizes Elias outright told him hope would be crueler than anything else the Eye could do to him. That he stole Elias’s apocalypse from him, and then let Elias give him--hope.  
  
He presses down hard on the scar on his wrist, and thinks of Jon saying “Goodbye, Martin,” close and soft, of Jon all alone in an empty world, of the Lonely using Martin’s tongue to say _you can have me back_ , the best temptation it could dream up.

Martin swallows back the tears, and rolls his sleeve back down.  
  
He hopes anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there. do you feel better now?


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jon reads some poetry.

Jon decides he’s not going to stay in the Archives. He spent the last few years of his life there, and he doesn’t intend to waste his second death wandering the Institute like a ghost.  
  
Instead, he walks the city. 

The empty world isn’t as bad as he feared it would be. It’s...almost nice, in a horrible way. To be able to be outside, even though there isn’t a sun, and of course there are no noises the way there should be. But there’s a London to walk, familiar narrow alleys and broad avenues, bridges and water. There are no people for Jon to hurt in this London. 

There is a very chill wind, and there is no getting warm, no matter how often Jon stands outside the empty shops and thinks about just stealing a jacket. It’s cold enough he can’t sleep for very long either, although admittedly it’s a relief from the dreams. He still feels tired.  
  
Instead he just--wanders, cold and lonely.  
  
There really are worse things.  
  
Jon is one of them.

*

The second month, Jon is in a bookshop. One of the little used ones on Charing Cross Road, the ones he’d usually avoid in case of Leitners. But it’s not like the books can hurt him here, he reasons, and the televisions won’t turn on, so books are the only form of distraction he has. He expects they’ll stop feeling like an escape after a while, that it’s a comfort he’s allowed to have only because at some point it will be taken away. 

He’s thumbing through a battered black copy of the unabridged _De Profundis_ when he hears a thump. 

He whirls around, heart pounding in his throat. There are no sounds in the empty world that Jon doesn’t make himself. Not even the wind howls.  
  
It could be--it probably _is_ the Lonely come back to feed on him, Jon tells himself, squaring his shoulders. Maybe he hasn’t been afraid enough, or unhappy enough, and it’s come back to give him a reason. He reminds himself of the Daedelus, the alliance between Isolation and the Dark, and wonders if he’ll soon be chased through the empty world by something shadowy and bleak with too many teeth.

But after an awful minute of waiting for something to leap out at him, nothing happens.  
  
Jon takes a deep breath, and rounds the corner.  
  
There’s nothing there.  
  
Except--  
  
On the floor, there’s an open book. Jon is certain there wasn’t a book on the floor when he came in.  
  
He stoops down to examine it, careful not to touch. It’s a book of poetry--Yeats, looks like. Not much to Jon’s taste. It’s open to “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” Jon glances at it, and his eye catches on the final stanza, which someone has taken the trouble of bracketing in thick purple ink:  
  
_Though I am old with wandering  
_ _Through hollow lands and hilly lands,  
_ _ I will find out where she has gone,  
_ _And kiss her lips and take her hands;  
_ _And walk among long dappled grass,  
_ _And pluck till time and times are done,  
_ _The silver apples of the moon,_  
_The golden apples of the sun._

Jon flinches back from the book, his heart racing. After a long minute, he gets up from the floor on suddenly watery legs, goes to steal a pen from behind the counter. He returns to the book, uses the pen to check the bookplate--it’s not a Leitner. That doesn’t mean it’s  _safe,_ obviously, but--worth the risk.  
  
Jon gets down on his knees to write in the book, leaving it exactly where he found it. After a moment, he scribbles in the margins:  
  
_Please don’t._ And underlines it.  
  
He doesn’t get a reply until three days later, when he stops to rest on a bench in Piccadilly Circus, and a book drops onto the bench beside him, left open face-down, only one page left unread. Jon picks it up--it’s a cheap paperback copy of _The Two Towers_ \--and turns to the marked page.

Someone’s clearly written in the margins, but the ink has been so badly smudged he can’t read it.  
  
The circled passage on the page, however, is perfectly clear:  
  
_Sam reeled, clutching at the stone. He felt as if the whole dark world was turning upside down. So great was the shock that he almost swooned, but even as he fought to keep a hold on his senses, deep inside him he was aware of the comment: ‘You fool, he isn’t dead, and your heart knew it. Don’t trust your head, Samwise, it is not the best part of you. The trouble with you is that you never really had any hope._ _Now what is to be done_ _?’_  
  
The last line is underlined hard. _  
_

Jon inhales a shaky breath, and gives into the temptation to clutch the book to his chest. It’s not that he didn’t think Martin would look for him--he knew Martin would, it was part of the damn torture to know he would be--but god, _god_ , it is good to hear from him. It would be from anyone, but. From him especially.  
  
The breeze hits him again, a sharp chill, and Jon makes himself steady his breathing. All right. It makes sense, he thinks, that books exist in both places, that they travel better than anything else. Books are excellent vessels, which is why so many of them are deadly.  
  
Writing obviously doesn’t travel as easily, although there has to be a way to do it--Barnabas Bennett _did_ send Jonah Magnus a letter. Who knows how many attempts he made before his success, however.  
  
But for now--  
  
The last time Jon read Tolkien, he was twelve. He pages stupidly through the book, hoping Martin will know to wait for him, won’t leave thinking there’s been no response--clearly Martin has some way of knowing where Jon is, where to leave the books. There’s nothing perfectly apt in the book that Jon can see. What he wants to do is tell Martin to stop, that he’s glad Martin got away from the Lonely, and he doesn’t think Lukas is likely to be persuaded to let him go. That after what nearly happened--what he and Elias nearly did--this is what he deserves.  
  
The best he can do in the end is circle a passage towards the middle of the book.  
  
_And after all he never had any real hope in the affair from the beginning; but being a cheerful hobbit he had not needed hope, as long as despair could be postponed._ _ Now they were come to the bitter end. _  
  
Hesitantly, on the opposing page, Jon picks out a fairly incoherent line of Gollum’s dialogue--he really remembers the book being a little more sophisticated--and circles the word _good-bye_. 

He dog-ears the page, wincing a little at the rough treatment, and puts the book back down on the bench, brushing the cover with the backs of his knuckles as though--well. As though it were his last chance to touch someone.  He makes himself get up and walk away without looking back, his chest tight and aching. He almost wonders if this torment was especially designed by Lukas, making him say goodbye over and over again.  
  
*  
  
A few days later, Jon almost trips over a fat hardback in his flat. He still goes back to his flat every once in a while, to shower and--feel human. He realizes this means Martin must be in his flat, too, and shivers even as he feels a jolt of self-consciousness. He hadn’t…cleaned much, in the months before the ritual. There’s a dead plant on the bookshelf, and dirty dishes left on the counter, and the state of the bathroom is--and Martin wouldn’t care about any of that, so Jon tries to put it out of his mind.  
  
This time it’s Harry Potter. They’re getting more prosaic, not less. He opens it to the dog-eared page, and again there’s writing in the margin, and again it’s smudged beyond legibility. There’s only one marked passage.  
  
_“You are protected, in short, by your ability to love!” said Dumbledore loudly. “The only protection that can possibly work against the lure of power like Voldemort’s!”_

Jon takes a deep breath. The meaning, he thinks, is straightforward--Martin thinks focusing on his emotional connections to the world can help draw him out of the Lonely. And Jon has rather--Jon’s hand was tipped for him, during the ritual.  
  
Jon finds himself biting his lower lip hard, and flips through the book a bit. He’s actually never read this book, but Georgie made him watch the films, and he thinks--ah. Yes. He searches out a pen from his desk, and brackets a paragraph.  
  
_Harry did not know what he was saying; he fell to his knees beside Malfoy, who was shaking uncontrollably in a pool of his own blood. Moaning Myrtle let out a deafening scream: “MURDER! MURDER IN THE BATHROOM! MURDER!”_  
  
And a little further down the page:  
  
_Harry was still watching, horrified by what he had done, barely aware that he too was soaked in blood and water._

It’s not the same as “I became a monster and nearly completed the Watcher’s Crown,” but it’ll have to do. Jon closes the book, and gets up to make tea.  
  
The book slaps open on the floor before the kettle’s even boiled, emphatic.  
  
_“There is little time, one way or another,” said Dumbledore. “_ _So let us discuss your options_ , _Draco_ _._ ”  
  
_“My options!” said Malfoy loudly. “I’m standing here with a wand--I’m about to kill you--”_

_“My dear boy, let us have no more pretense about that. If you were going to kill me, you would have done it when you first disarmed me, you would not have stopped for this pleasant chat about ways and means.”_

Jon hisses in irritation, and underlines a passage on the opposite page, closing the book so Martin will notice the update.   
_  
“Someone’s dead,” said Malfoy, and his voice seemed to go up an octave as he said it. “One of your people...I don’t know who, it was dark...I stepped over the body…”  
_  
There. The meaning’s clear enough, he hopes--people are dead because of Jon. He’s hurt more people than that. People who didn’t deserve it. And he would have done much worse, if the Lonely hadn’t stopped him.  
  
The book opens up again barely a minute later, on the same page.  
  
_“I can help you, Draco.”_  
  
And underneath that, Martin has viciously crossed out the character’s reply: __~~“No you can’t,” said Malfoy, his wand hand shaking very badly indeed. “Nobody can.”~~

Jon’s pulse is throbbing in his throat, in his wrists.

He closes his eyes, tries to center himself for a long moment, and when he opens them again, the page has been turned, and there’s a new sentence circled.  
  
_“It is my mercy, and not yours, that matters now.”_

Jon chokes a little. “Do you have the book bloody memorized,” he mutters out loud, and traces the sentence again with the tip of his forefinger. He lets himself fully realize that in order to be speaking to Martin like this, they have to both be sitting on the hardwood floor of his flat, occupying very nearly the same space. Both of their hands might right now be touching the book. 

He lets himself long for it, just for a minute. Martin, who he--Martin who _knows_ Jon loves him, although Jon’s never actually said it, sitting on the floor of his flat and reading a terrible mass-market book to him. He wants to touch him, wants to share this moment with him so badly it hurts.  
  
And just for an instant--in the space between one heartbeat and another--Jon swears he feels the brush of a hand against his. His whole body shocks with it, a sharp electric thing that reverberates deeply in him, although it’s gone as soon as it’s begun. 

When Jon’s fully gathered himself--he has to get up and finish making the tea, and discreetly scrub at his eyes, even though he knows Martin can’t actually see him--he comes back and finds one last message. 

 _“You said to us once before,” said Hermione quietly, “that there was time to turn back if we wanted to. We’ve had time, haven’t we?”_ _  
_ _  
_ _“We’re with you whatever happens,” said Ron._  
  
“Christ,” Jon says, and nearly spills his tea, his hands are shaking so badly.  
  
*  
  
After that, the messages come nearly every day, although they very rarely manage instant communication like that again.  
  
More often than not, Jon will wake up and find a book waiting for him, something Martin left open on his dining room table the night before. It’s all kinds of literature--sometimes Shakespeare and sometimes cheap novelizations of films Jon hasn’t seen. He imagines Martin leaving work and heading straight to Jon’s flat, leaving his message before making his own way home, and that idiotic ember of feeling warms in his chest, even though the wind around him is increasingly frigid.  

Jon raids bookstores at will, finding material enough to hold something like a proper conversation. He leaves his replies for Martin laid out ostentatiously in his own flat, usually on the floor where they’ll be noticeable.  
  
In this way they discuss the problem of Jon’s captivity: Jon doesn’t know of any way to escape the Lonely except by appealing to the source, and the Eye and the Forsaken no longer appear to be allies. He gathers from Martin’s liberal use of greek dramas that the Forsaken resents having a prodigal son taken from them, so Peter Lukas probably is actually dead. He learns that the Eye’s agents are significantly weakened after the ritual’s failure and Jon’s abduction, because Martin sends him quite a few passages about blindness. So both threatening and tempting the Forsaken into letting him go appear to be out. Martin is looking into--something, although Jon can’t quite make out what, and wants him to be patient. 

In the meantime, they discuss plenty of other less important things. Martin obviously thinks Jon needs to talk to someone--whether putting credit towards his eventual rescue or just to keep Jon sane--and when Jon remembers that light touch on his hand, he can’t argue.  
  
“ _I have been studying how i may compare/this prison where I live unto the world;_ ” he sends Martin from Richard II. “ _And, for because the world is populous/And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it.”_    
  
Martin sends him back Mary Oliver, a full poem about trees that Jon isn’t at all sure he understands. He’d never admit it, but he’s….never really _gotten_ poetry. But the poem begins “ _Look, the trees/are turning/their own bodies into pillars/of light,_ ” and it ends like this:  
  
_To live in this world_ _  
_ _  
_ _you must be able to do three things:_ _  
_ _to love what is mortal;_ _  
_ _to_ _hold it_ _  
_ _  
_ _against your bones_ _knowing_ _  
_ _your own life depends on it;_ _  
_ _and, when the time comes to let it go,_  
_to let it go._

Martin has lightly underlined “hold it against your bones,” and Jon reads the damn poem three times trying to work out what it means. Afterwards he walks out in the park, and looks at the white fog drifting through the trees, and thinks it could almost be an ordinary early morning mist.   
  
Jon is reading more than he has in years--or reading more frivolous literature than he has in years, at any rate, seeking out useful things to give to Martin. After a few weeks he starts to feel the fatigue that Barnabas Bennett described: the more books he reads about human connection, the worse they begin to make him feel. He keeps trying to write in the margins, but nothing clear ever comes through.  
  
Once he leaves Martin a book on his desk at the Institute, in the office next to Elias’s, but the book--a paperback Jane Austen--doesn’t stay on the desk for very long. Frowning, Jon walks down the familiar staircase to the Archives, the hair on the back of his neck unaccountably prickling.  
  
Sure enough, he finds _Persuasion_ sitting on his own old desk, next to a cold cup of tea.  
  
This is the Archivist’s desk, Jon thinks, and shudders. For a moment he’s actually afraid he’s going to be sick. 

Not for the first time, he wonders how it is that Martin always knows where Jon is, what he had to trade away to buy them even this much.  
  
He shoves _Persuasion_ off the desk and onto the floor before grabbing the nearest statement--there’s a high stack of them on the desk that adds to the heaviness in his stomach--and finds an appropriate message on the second page of the transcript, circling it in dry erase marker and not caring that he’s made the thing significantly harder to read.  
  
_And I kept thinking, you know,_ _ don’t do this to yourself, just get out, _ _but by then it was too late._  
  
It feels--odd, and sort of awful--to be touching a statement again. Jon’s skin prickles with the cold, and he leaves the Archives. He wishes bitterly that Martin would, too. 

The reply he gets appears at his elbow at the wine bar he finds himself in that evening. It’s poetry--Langston Hughes. 

 _I am so tired of waiting,  
_ _Aren't you,  
_ _For the world to become good  
_ _And beautiful and kind?  
_ _Let us take a knife  
_ _And cut the world in two-  
_ _And see what worms are eating  
_ _At the rind._  
  
“What am I supposed to do with that?” Jon asks the book incredulously, his foolish heart aching and aching, and of course it doesn’t answer him.

*  
  
Jon has nothing but time to think, really, so he thinks about the ritual. How lost he’d gotten, how arrogant he’d been. How close they had come. If Martin were dead, or if Martin had forgotten all about him, or if Martin didn’t care about him, Jon would be grateful to the Forsaken for stopping it, and for the reprieve. It’s impossible to be the Archivist here, so he isn’t. He’s as close to being Jon Sims, he thinks, as he’s been in years.  
  
Absently he trails a finger up and down the spine of Martin’s most recent message, poems by Louise Glück. ( _Speak to me, aching heart: what ridiculous errand are you inventing for yourself_? He thinks it was meant fondly. Martin telling him to try not to worry.) 

Jon didn’t know he loved Martin until he Knew he did. Or--that’s not quite true, but--it nearly is.

He knew it was terrible when Martin left, but he’d made the decision to trust him. He’d known he missed Martin, that he wanted him to be safe, that he didn’t want to lose one of the only people who’d ever liked poor Jon Sims before he died in the bloody House of Wax--he’d known that the glimpses he’d caught of Martin after that had made him hungry for more, resentful and sad that he couldn’t have it.   
  
But love? The Lonely had to _tell_ him he loved Martin. 

That’s Jon Sims for you. Always five steps behind.   
  
Martin only highlighted the first line of Glück’s _Midnight_ , but Jon reads the rest of the poem anyway. It ends like this:  
  
_If I were you  
I’d think ahead. After fifteen years,  
his voice could be getting tired; some night  
_ _if you don’t answer, someone else will answer._  
  
If Jon didn’t love Martin before this, he certainly does now. 

He isn’t totally sure what Martin feels for him, but he’s also decided that doesn’t really matter. Martin liked him when he was alive, and Martin is too kind to leave anyone alone to die, once the Lonely let him go. The important thing is that Jon is not going to let Martin live like Wandering Aengus, is not going to let him follow Jon forever, because Martin deserves to live, to be happy, to be human.   
  
He just isn’t strong enough to end things yet, not while the cold still prevents him from sleeping for more than an hour or so at a time, not while Jon still goes to stand by the brown stretch of the Thames and the water doesn’t make a sound as it laps against the shore. Not while there’s still a chance a real effort could let him touch Martin again, even though it hasn’t worked once since the first time.  
  
There hasn’t been, as far as Jon has been able to make out, any progress towards his rescue. 

He thinks he’s found the book he’s going to use as a real farewell, when he can work up enough strength for it. It’s hardly the book he’d choose--it’s a children’s book, and not one he’s read. But it has a character named Martin in it, and plenty of dialogue, and that’s all Jon needs. It take three folded pages from different points in the book, but it will allow him to say _Martin. We have come to the end. Please let go_. He keeps it in his coat pocket, where Martin won’t find it accidentally, where he’ll have it ready when he needs it. 

In the end, Jon doesn’t have to make the choice. 

He’s in Martin’s flat, just finishing marking up a Keats poem for when he gets home from work, when he hears the sound of a key turning in a lock. He jerks with surprise, leaving a jagged streak on the paper, but already he feels something like relief. 

The man who strolls genially into the room is obviously a Lukas, although not one Jon’s met before. He has the look, though, empty and pleased.  
  
“Here you are,” the Lonely says, giving Jon a familiar smile. 

“Here I am,” Jon agrees soberly, capping the pen. “Come to check on the prisoner?”  
  
“You’re not a prisoner, Archivist,” the Lonely says fondly. “You’re a--fermenting wine. I’m going to _savor_ you, once you’re done properly aging.”  
  
Jon makes a face, and the Lonely chuckles. “Right then,” it says. “While you’ve been giving yourself quite a flavorful heartsick streak, I think it’s time to bring out some notes of real despair. What do you think, Archivist? Should I blind you?”  
  
Jon imagines navigating the soundless world without sight, by touch alone, and can’t stop himself from shuddering.  
  
The Lonely grins. “Well, definitely at some point down the road,” it says. “But perhaps to start--I think you’ve been getting too much connection out of two-way communication. You like being able to talk--your people usually do. I think we’ll stop that.” It snaps two thick fingers together.  
  
Jon blinks, and then instinctively reaches for the abandoned Keats. His hand goes right through the book, as if it were fully transparent. Jon goes very still, feeling sick. If he can’t touch the books, he won’t be able to read what Martin sends him, much less reply--but he’ll still _know_ Martin is trying to talk to him. It’s. It’s going to drive him mad.  
  
The Lonely winks at him. “That’s it,” it says, satisfied. “Til next time, Archivist.” 

It leaves, making sure to lock Martin’s flat up behind itself.  
  
Jon tries very hard not to have a panic attack in Martin’s living room, but he can’t help himself.   
  
A few hours later, a different volume appears on the table next to the Keats, and of course Jon can’t open it. He can imagine, though, that Martin is worried, that he can see the surprised mark scratched across the page Jon left for him. He obviously knows Jon is still in his flat, or he wouldn’t have left the book here, and anyway Martin always seems to know where he is.  
  
Jon inhales a shaky breath, and reaches for his coat, and the children’s book he’s kept in the inside pocket. He can’t touch the book itself, but he is able finally to shake the book free, so it lands on the floor of Martin’s flat.  
  
Jon imagines Martin bending over to pick it up, smoothing out the first dog-ear, then the second, then the third.  
  
Jon closes his eyes and imagines Martin in as much detail as he is able to: the broad frame, the round, worried face, the freckles on the bridge of his nose, his plastic-framed glasses. He loves him, he thinks, and he should have told him so. “Martin,” he whispers, keeping his eyes closed. “We have come to the end. Please, uh. Please let me go.”  
  
After a while he opens his eyes.  
  
The flat is as empty as it was when he entered it. Everything is perfectly still.  
  
Jon gives an awkward pat to the wall beside the door before he quietly lets himself out. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I actively page through The Half Blood Prince at one in the morning trying to work out which lines of dialogue Jon and Martin could repurpose to have a conversation with each other???? 
> 
> Yes, my friends, I did. 
> 
> Comments make me happy. :)


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _I have a strange feeling with regard to you. As if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you. And if you were to leave I’m afraid that cord of communion would snap._

It’s been three months since the last time Martin saw Jon’s face, and even longer than that since the last time they spoke--really spoke, just the two of them, without John Keats or J K Rowling or the Lonely in between. He misses him, but that’s nothing new. He’s been missing Jon for--actual years now, thanks to Peter and the coma. In a pathetic way Martin has sort of been missing Jon since they met? From about a month or so after he first clapped eyes on Jon’s greying curls and his elegant hands and met his irritated gaze, he’s wanted to get closer than was allowed, wanted Jon when Jon wasn’t there, miserably lain awake and imagined things he knew reasonably would never happen. So in that sense, nothing’s changed.  
  
Nothing has changed, except that Jon has stopped communicating with him entirely, and it’s driving Martin _frantic_.  
  
He knows Jon is still alive, at least, because Elias’s sigil still burns hot in his wrist whenever Jon is nearby.

 It’s not as bad as it was at the beginning, when Martin had been reduced to wandering uselessly all over London, chasing little psychosomatic flickers of warmth in his scar until he’d finally gone into a bookshop on his day off and suddenly Elias’s Eye _scalded_ him, and he’d almost cried with relief. But Martin’s spent months talking to Jon every day, and he knows Jon’s patterns now--the coffee shops he likes to go to, the pubs he frequents, the habit he has of spending hours in the middle of Millennium Bridge, for unknowable reasons. He doesn’t go to Martin’s flat anymore, or to the Archives, but he hasn’t changed his other routines.  
  
Martin finds him every day, no matter the cost to his work, just to reassure himself that Jon is still alive, still breathing somewhere. He still leaves Jon books, although he never gets a reply. The messages grow simpler with Martin’s desperation: mostly variations on _stay alive_ and _I will not leave you_. He doesn’t even know if Jon’s reading them, because the books never shift position, as far as he can tell.

“Something is wrong,” Martin says for about the hundredth time, pacing Elias’s office. The Archives still smell like burnt paper and plastic, even though it’s been months, but not here. Elias’s office is unchanged, that damned clock still slowly ticking. “He wouldn’t just stop talking to me, not without a reason.”  
  
“I’m not disagreeing,” Elias replies, cool as ever behind his blindfold. “I just don’t see what you expect me to do about it.” 

“I expect you to _help me_ ,” Martin says, tugging at his own hair. “I expect you to _do_ something!”   
  
“I am helping you,” Elias says, and the Eye on Martin’s wrist twinges with sharp pain, for just a second. “I’m doing everything within my power, Martin. Lord knows I’d rather have a competent Archivist around to stop the Extinction. Not to mention dealing with the state of the Archives after the fire. But neither of us can help Jon if the world ends first.”  
  
“Don’t pretend to care about the end of the world,” Martin snaps. “Or about Jon. After everything you’ve done, I think you can at least stand to be honest for five minutes.”  
  
Elias smiles at him, like he’s a puppy that’s successfully performed a trick. “I sincerely don’t want anyone else to win before our chance comes back around. Which, thanks to you, will now take upwards of a hundred years. How’s that?” 

Martin rubs at his eyes. “Look, Elias--I can’t keep doing nothing, _please._ ” 

“On that much, we are agreed,” Elias says, his voice sharpening and his mouth twisting slightly. “It is well past time that you did something, Acting Archivist.” 

Martin stares at him. “What do you--?”  
  
“I _mean_ ,” Elias says, composed again, “that you have all the resources you need at your disposal, and need no longer waste either my time or your own. You were part of the Lonely. You know what it looks like, what it feels like. You now quite unequivocally belong to the Eye. Go and _look_ at something, will you?” 

There’s a suggestion in the last part, or a compulsion, Martin isn’t sure which. He finds himself leaving Elias’s office, rubbing the scar on his wrist. 

“Basira,” he says when he gets back down to the Archives. She looks up at him, carefully blank. As usual. It’s what happens when you work directly with not one but two evil bosses, he guesses. “I, um, I think I’m gonna be gone for a few days.”  
  
“All right,” she says. “Do you need anything from us?” 

At this, Melanie looks up from her own desk, more visibly wary.  
  
“No,” Martin answers her. “No, just--carry on as you are.” 

*

He goes back to Kent. 

He still hasn’t found an address for Moorland House, but he rents a car and drives in frustrating circles all around the Kentish Downs, trying to--well, to Look. He doesn’t feel anything unusual, and his scar is quiescent. He thinks of Elias’s smug face underneath its stark black blindfold, and thinks again about punching the grin right off his face.

After a full day of fruitless driving and seeing absolutely nothing of any supernatural interest, Martin stops in Stelling Minnis for a bite.  
  
He’s sat at a back table at the local, trying not to think about whether Jon has noticed there hasn’t been a book today, whether he’ll think Martin’s abandoned him, whether Martin will still be able to find him when he goes home--when he realizes that his scar is burning. He can’t believe it at first--what would Jon be doing in Stelling Minnis, when he’s never left London before?--when he realizes that there’s something else tugging at the edge of his attention. 

There’s a young woman at a table by herself, reading a book. He glances down at his scar, and for a second it doesn’t look like a scar at all, but like an enormous over-size eye, blue and blown-wide. Then he blinks, and it’s just red and raised skin. He looks back at the woman: her blonde hair is slipping into her face, but she’s still hauntingly familiar. Martin’s mind races, trying to place her--and then he really looks at her, and it’s like he can _taste_ the fog in the air, like she’s just come out of a mist and still smells of rain and petrichor. He jerks tup and crosses to her table, and she looks up at him, startled. 

“Please,” he says, awkward and aching. “Please, I--need to talk to you.”  
  
“Uh, sorry,” she says, frowning like she’s trying to place him but hasn’t yet, “Who the hell are you?” 

“My name is Martin Blackwood,” he says, trying to sound as nonthreatening as possible, and glad that he’d opted for a lilac T-shirt that morning, in case she was the kind of person who thought you weren’t dangerous if you were a bit feminine, “And, and you’re Naomi Herne, right? I met you a couple of years ago. At the Magnus Institute.”  
  
Her face immediately closes off, and she tries to stand, grabbing her purse.  
  
“No, please,” Martin says, and sits, trying to make himself smaller. “Please, I need your help.”  
  
She looks back at him, eyes hard. “Any reason I should help you?”  
  
“What happened to you was real,” he tells her in a quick rush. “It happened, and I’m sorry for what J--I’m sorry we didn’t help you. But someone I care about is trapped in the fog. And I need to get him out, but I--don’t know how.”  
  
She stares at him, still obviously wary, and he exhales, long and slow. “Please help me,” he says again, blinking away dampness. “I don’t know what else to do.” 

“Oh Christ,” she mutters, and slowly sits back into her chair. “You’d better not make me regret this.”  
  
“I swear I’m not here to hurt you,” Martin says. “I didn’t even know you’d be here, I just--saw you, and I don’t think that’s coincidental.”  
  
She gives him a level look. “On that much we’re agreed.”  
  
Martin just looks at her, trying to project as much sincerity as he can.  
  
“This person you care about,” she says after a long moment. “Does he care about you?” 

“I--I think so,” Martin says, his chest aching with the old, well-worn hurt. _Don’t you remember what I am to you_ , the other him had asked, and then it had said _You love me, Jon_ , and the Archivist hadn’t argued. “I--yes. He does.” 

She sighs. She puts her purse down. “All right. What do you want to know?”  
  
“Everything,” Martin says, and it’s like he can feel the echo of that somewhere in his bones, aching particularly sharply in his wrist. Everything.  
  
*  
  
It’s not a real statement, because there isn’t a tape recorder, and anyway Martin isn’t really the Archivist, and the details of her phrasing sort of blur after she finishes speaking. But he’s sure he remembers all the facts of what she tells him.   
  
Naomi Herne’s statement, then, goes something like this:  
  
She had a bad time of it for a few years after visiting the Magnus Institute. She couldn’t stop thinking about Evan lying in that coffin, or about the graveyard, the moonlit field she saw through that chapel. It was especially bad because she’d dream about it nearly every night--at least once a week, without fail. She spent so much time thinking about Evan dead that she started to forget what Evan was like alive, which was awful, and she still found herself numb in her daily interactions with people, listless at her job, isolated in nearly every way that mattered. The dreams got worse about a year ago, nearly overnight--she still dreamed about the funeral and the graveyard and the cold white fog, but this time there was someone watching her, and he had too many eyes, and no matter what she did he wouldn’t go away. She’d already been in a years-long depressive episode, and the new feeling of being constantly watched really triggered her anxiety, made everything just. Worse. 

Then three months ago, the Lukas family contacted her for the first time since Evan’s death.   
  
She got a thick white card in the mail, embossed with formal calligraphy. It was an invitation to a funeral for a man she hadn’t met--or if she had, she didn’t remember him distinct from the crowd of silent, staring Lukases she’d seen in the room with Evan’s coffin. 

She didn’t go, of course, but she was very afraid, and she dreaded her dreams that night--  
  
\--except that night, for the first night in a year, the dream didn’t come. 

Instead she dreamed about Evan. The living Evan, the one she barely remembered at that point. The smile lines around his green eyes, his warm hands, the way he used to giggle at dumb internet memes and sing along to the radio. She woke up weeping, and in pain--physical pain, although she wasn’t hurt. Just suddenly she could feel her body--the sting of her wind-chafed skin, the blister on her foot she’d been ignoring, the papercut on her finger. It was like she’d been numb, and suddenly she could feel, and it _hurt_. She dreamed of Evan every night that week, and every dream was a memory, each memory growing in length and complexity, and every time she woke up she felt something new, a sensation she’d somehow forgotten about in the years since he’d died.  
  
The last night of that week, she dreamed about Evan reading to her from his favorite book, a battered copy of _Jane Eyre_. He’d done this many times, because she’d loved to listen to him read, and he’d jokingly wanted to prove to her that _Jane Eyre_ really was more feminist than Jane Austen. He was sitting next to her in bed, his legs warm and tangled up with hers, and he was reading the part about the strings and ribs.  
  
_I have a strange feeling with regard to you. As if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you. And if you were to leave I’m afraid that cord of communion would snap. And I have a notion that I’d take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, you’d forget me._  
  
And she’d twisted in his arms, and she kissed him, and she told him she’d never forget him.  
  
And Evan looked at her quietly and told her _all right, don’t forget me_. But he also told her she needed other loves. She needed more strings, to knot herself as tightly as she could to the world, or he wouldn’t be able to stop them from getting at her. If he were her only string, he told her, sounding ashamed,  he wouldn’t be able to stop _himself_ from slowly pulling her through to him. _So promise me_ , he said, and kissed her temple, _promise me you’ll find other people to lov_ _e_ , and all Naomi could say to him in the dream was _I love you, I love you, I love you_. 

Then she woke up, and for a second she could still feel his arm around her shoulders, his lips on her forehead. It wasn’t a dream, he was _there_. 

And then an instant later, he was gone. She was in worse pain than she’d been all week, her whole body prickling like it had just come alive again, and her heart aching as badly as it had the day he died, or nearly. She cried for a while, and thought maybe it had just been a dream. Her psyche finally dealing with the old grief, now that she’d had time to process.  
  
But on the bed beside her was his old, battered copy of Jane Eyre, and on the inside cover was the signature he’d clearly put in there in school, the familiar permanent marker that read _Property of Evan Lukas_ , and underneath that, in fresh ink and the same handwriting, were the words _Promise me_.

It had been three months since then. 

Naomi feels more awake than she has in years, and she’s had no more dreams, although she’s half-hoped for them to return. She’s tried to keep her promise. She’s gone out for coffee with old friends, gone to the movies with a colleague from work.   
  
It’s hard, but--it’s better than it’s been since he was alive.  
  
It’s like he gave her back the world. He gave her the world for a second time, and it’s so hard, it’s just fucking unfair that he’s still dead, that she’s never going to see him again, but she’s still just. Painfully grateful. 

“Thank you,” Martin says when she’s done talking, and they’re both red-eyed. “Thank you so much.”  
  
Naomi scrubs at her eyes with the back of her hand, sniffs a little. “Yeah, well,” she says. “Good luck, I guess.” 

*  
  
The second to last message that Jon sent him was a poem from Keats. He thinks Jon was trying to say something like “I’m all right,” and “Don’t worry,” even though the actual point of the poem was something rather different. He knows Jon doesn’t like Keats, but it warms him to think of Jon trying. Warmed him.  
  
_This living hand, now warm and capable  
_ _Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold  
_ _And in the icy silence of the tomb,  
_ _So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights  
_ _That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood  
_ _So in my veins red life might stream again,  
_ _And thou be conscience-calm’d–see here it is–  
_ _I hold it towards you._

Martin came home from work and found the book open on his coffee table, a careful bracket around the final couplet turned into a shocked line carving up the page, like something had surprised him. Martin has worried over that streak of ink for weeks, barely able to sleep.  
  
Of course the actual last message was worse, a little word search carefully drawn up in a brand new copy of _Martin The Warrior_ , a children’s book about mice whose title Martin tries not to feel mocked by. The message descended across several pages, and read:  
  
_Martin_ _  
_ _  
_ _  
_ _we have_

  
  
     

_come                                                                                                                                                                    to the_

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


_end. Please_

 

_let_

 

_go._

 

Martin had stood there, his heart burning in his chest, and said out loud “I _won’t_ , you stupid bastard, I swear I won’t,” and he’d written that into the book in as many ways as he knew how, but there was no reply. 

Eventually the Eye in his wrist went cold and he knew Jon was gone.  
  
* 

Martin writes up Naomi’s statement before even leaving the pub, and then drives straight back to the Institute, even though he doesn’t get back in until two in the morning. He spends the next few hours laying out everything he knows on every available flat surface in Jon’s office, and then passes out on the desk.  
  
He wakes up to the smell of coffee, and the vague idea that people around him are talking.  
  
“--but what about the threads themselves,” Basira is saying. “Yeah, it’s a metaphor, but there’s gotta be a reason he picked that metaphor, right?”   
  
Martin opens his eyes, and finds that Jon’s office has been thoroughly invaded by his coworkers: Basira is examining the things he taped to the window and circling stuff in pink highlighter, Melanie is half-buried in papers and sitting on the floor, and Daisy has her feet kicked up on Martin’s desk, the dirty soles of her trainers about three inches from Martin’s nose.  
  
“He’s up,” Daisy says, and sips from her coffee. She’s used Martin’s favorite mug.  
  
“Um,” Martin croaks, and sits up, his whole body complaining loudly at the rough treatment. “What?”  
  
“You’re shit at hiding things,” Daisy says flatly, not moving her feet.  
  
“At least you are without big bad daddy Lukas covering your tracks,” Melanie adds, crisply tapping a stack of papers on the floor. “Got a bit _comfy_ whooshing in and whooshing out of existence on a whim, did you?” 

Martin swallows.  
  
“Not the time,” Basira says, distracted, and taps her pen on the glass. “Martin, you’re sure Herne wasn’t just being poetic? Evan Lukas really used the string metaphor to talk about pulling someone into the Lonely?”  
  
“Uh, I, I, I think so,” Martin says, and scrubs at his face blearily. “I mean, I’m not--the Archivist, so she could have been lying to me, but I don’t--um, wait,” he says, realizing. “You all know what I’m working on?”  
  
Daisy makes a disgusted noise.  
  
“Trying to save Jon from the most recent thing to eat him,” Melanie says, and rolls her eyes. “What else is new.”  
  
“What,” Daisy says, dangerously soft. “You didn’t think we’d want to help?”  
  
The months leading up to the failed ritual were--well, Martin wasn’t even here for that, and he knows it was bad. All three of them belong to the Beholding now, all prior claims erased, or scarred over. There won’t be any more attempted switching of allegiances, because--what happened to them, what the Watcher and the Archivist did to them is--not really erasable. Martin chose it, but he doesn’t think they all had a choice. At least not in the same way.  
  
“No,” Martin says to her, too tired to lie, “I actually didn’t think you would.”  
  
Daisy bares her teeth and deliberately stretches her legs, til she’s shoving him against the back of his chair with her foot pressed to his throat. “You weren’t even here,” she tells him, banked rage in her voice. There’s no real pressure, but Martin can feel his heart beating too fast anyway. “You have no idea how things were, not that you’ve bothered to ask. So in spite of whatever torch you’ve been carrying for the last pathetic decade of your life, you don’t have a monopoly on _caring_ about the bastard.”  
  
“I don’t care about him,” Melanie remarks, not looking up from her papers. “Just don’t want to die in the bloody Extinction, and you’re a rubbish excuse for an acting Archivist.” 

“Caring,” Basira interrupts, “is exactly the point! Look,” she says, and raps impatiently at the papers she’s been highlighting. “Jane Eyre, all right? I don’t think that passage was a coincidence. We’ve seen plenty of previous Lonely statements where the victim manages to escape at the last second because they’ve been able to focus on their emotional ties to other people--especially Andrea Nunis, which gives us Gerard Keay’s testimony as well--but this is the first time we’ve gotten the suggestion that _emotional strings run both ways_.”  
  
Martin blinks at her, and then shoves Daisy away, hard, as he rushes to stand up and join Basira at the window. “Wait, so you’re saying--”  
  
“I’m saying,” Basira says, “That if you’re right about the books, that they’re vessels between worlds, and Lukas is right about the strings, then we might have an opportunity.”  
  
Martin’s gotten two hours of sleep in the last forty-eight, and the last month has been--awful, and he hasn’t handled it well, and he’s an _idiot_ , and Basira has a theory for _how to get Jon out_ , which is why it’s totally understandable that he immediately bursts into tears, choking with relief.  
  
“Um,” Basira says, uncomfortable, and Melanie makes a kind of helpless noise from the floor.  
  
“There there,” Daisy says, not sounding sympathetic at all. “That’s what you get for not asking for help, isn’t it?”  
  
Martin does his best to pull himself together, although he can’t really stop his voice from trembling. “Okay,” he says, “Okay, what--what do we do?”  
  
*

This is the idea, as the lot of them eventually work it out, with a great deal of caffeine and only four shouting matches, the rest of the week’s work left untouched:  
  
Martin knows where to find Jon, and he also knows that the books can pass between the worlds. He doesn’t know why Jon has stopped responding, but theoretically the books are still getting through: evidence of absence is not absence of evidence, or, or something.  
  
Basira thinks Evan’s choice of _Jane Eyre_ itself is meaningful: the book traveled from the Lonely into the real world, sure, but it was also a book that both Naomi and Evan cared about--that they both thought of as important to the relationship, especially the marked passage.  
  
Melanie thinks that means it probably acted as a beacon, or an amp, which is why Evan was able to touch Naomi, at least for a second. When Martin confesses the circumstances of the one and only time he managed something similar with Jon--a confession that leads to their second screaming match, and Daisy smashing his third favorite tea mug onto the floor--she’s only more convinced that this is the case. The book itself helped the connection go taut--if the goal is to yank on emotional threads between worlds, being able to wind them around the book itself has got to boost the power.  
  
_Harry Potter and The Halfblood Prince_ got Martin through his final year at school, embarrassingly enough. He has the whole series practically memorized, but that one was always his favorite--because of the ending, because of the tragedy of it all but the promise of escape. It was--he could identify with it, as a lonely teenage with a sick mother, the way Harry was both needed and hurt by the father-figure who ended up dying and--and both grieved and sort of freed by it.  
  
He didn’t get anything like as much of a connection as Natalie described having with Evan, though--just a quick brush of hands, so fast he’s half-worried he imagined it.  
  
“The good news is,” Melanie says, “Evan Lukas is actually dead, and Jon might only be technically dead--he went into the Lonely with his body, so presumably he’s got more of a body to be getting on with than Lukas. The bad news is, if your connection wasn’t as good as Naomi’s, _given_ that your circumstances were better--”  
  
\--Jon doesn’t love me as much as Evan loved Naomi, Martin thinks, which is stupid and unhelpful and not at all fair of him. Obviously Jon doesn’t. Naomi and Evan were _married_.  
  
“Maybe Jon’s not a fan of Harry Potter?” Basira suggests, rubbing her eyes. “He’s not, like, that kind of nerdy, is he?”  
  
“I mean I wouldn’t be _surprised_ ,” Daisy mutters.   
  
“So,” Melanie says, practical, “the _point_ is we’ve got to find a book that’s full of personal significance to Jon _and_ Martin, or else it might not work at all.”   
  
“Do we know….what kind of books Jon liked?” Daisy asks like she already regrets the answer, and Martin thinks of the stack of literal hundreds of books he has sitting in his flat from the months of correspondence with each other, and groans.  
  
They spend the next three days in Martin’s flat, sorting through books, and Martin suffers the peculiar agony of watching other people rifle through what he’s been trying very hard not to think of as love letters, but--  
  
“Sweet Jesus,” Melanie says, looking up from a copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. “‘Love shall not alter when it alteration finds,’ _really_?”  
  
Martin flushes down to his neck. “I, I’m pretty sure the context of that one was about changing the kind of coffee beans I buy,” he says, trying to maintain some semblance of dignity. That was the week Jon started spending time in Martin’s flat, the eye in his wrist burning comfortably for a few hours after work, and Martin noticed all kinds of small things going missing--the level of his coffee grounds being one. He’d worried about Jon drinking coffee at nine pm as much as he’d loved the idea of Jon sitting on his sofa in some other world, hands wrapped around one of Martin’s mugs, maybe warming himself a little, taking whatever comfort he could out of the scraps and fragments Martin could offer him. “It’s like I’ve been saying, the context of the work isn’t nearly as important as the context of the _conversation_ , hence--”  
  
“--the timeline,” Basira says grimly, and adds it to the enormous butcher paper timeline they’ve set up along one wall of Martin’s flat, listing the work, the date, and whatever context Martin remembers to the chart.  
  
It takes them a full week to establish a coherent emotional timeline of the months since Jon’s disappearance, complete with correspondence. At the end of it, Daisy is dead certain it’s _Martin the Warrior_ they’ll need, Basira thinks it’s probably Yeats because Yeats was the first one and frankly “Wandering Aengus”  is frighteningly apt, and Melanie thinks they should go with the one archival statement Jon scribbled up, on the grounds that Jon loves work more than people.  
  
Martin doesn’t know what the right book is. He’s got plenty of feelings about all of them, now, and the only thing he knows about Jon’s feelings is that--that at one point, Jon thought he loved Martin Blackwood, but that was before Martin left him alone. And now it’s been weeks since Jon stopped talking to him, and--what if it’s already too late to bring him out? Martin knows how it is, isolated in the fog. He knows how easy it is to forget that other people exist, to forget they might care about you, and to care about them in return. What if it won’t work because Jon’s already too far gone?  
  
“Then we jumpstart his heart back online,” Melanie says briskly. “Like a car battery.” She’s been making a list of people who might care about Jon Sims--who Jon Sims might have cared about--who they might be able to use as additional strings, further points of connection. Thus far, her list consists of Georgie Barker, which makes Martin’s heart hurt. Georgie’s apparently calling around to see if some of Jon’s friends from his master’s degree are still in London, though.   
  
Basically--according to Basira--what they’re doing is trying to build a locating device, and then fill it with so much emotional juice that it lets them pull Jon through to them, something between hauling an anchor and beaming someone up, like in Star Trek.  
  
Martin is well aware that what they’re actually doing is constructing a ritual. A ritual for bringing someone out of the Lonely, more like Gertrude’s circle in the forest than the Watcher’s Crown. And it’s--not going to work.  
  
“It’s not gonna work,” he says to Basira as soon as he realizes it, falling into the seat opposite her desk, back at the Archives.  
  
She deliberately unscrews a bottle of paracetamol and downs one before answering him. “Okay,” she says, too calm. “Why not?”  
  
“We’re trying to power this thing with emotional connection, right,” Martin says. “Which might be what we need to--juice up the cables, but we aren’t--we don’t serve the power of Love,” he says, and it’s so self-mocking it comes out sharp and irritated. He rubs the Eye on his wrist. “We need actual power behind this, and the only power we have--”  
  
“Is Beholding,” Basira finishes, and sighs. “I know. I’ve been thinking about this for a while.”  
  
“ _Have_ you,” Martin says, and she rolls her eyes.  
  
“Goes back to the coffin,” she says. “You leaving him all those tape recorders. He thought his rib was the anchor, but you knew better, right? It was his connection to the Eye. To being the Archivist.”  
  
“So--so you think we need to, what, lure him in with statements? With, with _food_?” Martin asks, and briefly wishes he weren’t considering it as a real option.  
  
Basira looks very serious. “I think it won’t be as bad as that, now that the Watcher’s Crown is done with,” she says slowly. “Elias is still blind, and--I think he’s weaker. Maybe that’s because he doesn’t have Jon, or. I’ve felt--a kind of lessening. Less--hunger, less immediacy. Like the Eye itself is less focused, or at least less focused on us. You haven’t noticed?”  
  
Martin shakes his head, frowning. He _should_ have noticed.  
  
“Makes sense,” Basira says. “You weren’t properly part of it until after we failed the ritual.” Her gaze goes unfocused for a minute. “It was, um. Worse. Before. Lot worse.”  
  
Hesitantly, Martin puts a hand on her shoulder, and her attention snaps back to him. He squeezes lightly and then lets go, and she gives him a bemused look. “Okay,” she says, businesslike again. “How do we get the Eye to power a weapon aimed at the Lonely?”  
  
*  
  
“I was wondering when you’d bring me into your little scheme,” Elias says, the clock ticking behind him. “Not that I haven’t appreciated the week’s reprieve.” 

Martin crosses his arms. “Are you gonna help us, or not?”  
  
“You’d like _my help_ in constructing and completing a ritual?” Elias asks pointedly, and Martin refuses to wince. He doesn’t regret stopping the Watcher’s Crown. He’s not even sure if he’d do it differently again. He’s sure Jon wouldn’t want him to. And anyway, he can’t change the past, only what happens next. 

“I’d like your help,” Martin says, “In getting Jon back.”  
  
Elias smiles thinly at him. “And who am I to resist?” He gestures for Martin to sit, and Martin sits. “You’ll want to take notes,” he says, and pushes a decorative pad of paper across the desk. “I’m afraid I mostly use voice-recognition software these days. Not quite as useful for, ah--detail work.”  
  
“Have you tried tape recorders?” Martin asks, refusing to be sympathetic.  
  
“If you’re ready,” Elias says, and clears his throat.  
  
*  
  
"You sure about this?" Basira asks when he comes out of Elias's office, feeling sick but determined.   
  
"Yeah," Martin says, and squares his shoulders. "Yeah, I'm sure."   
  
She studies him for another beat, and then shrugs. "On your head, I guess."   
  
*  
  
When they’re ready at last, they perform the ritual in document storage.  
  
It’s the area of the Archives worst-damaged by the fire. They lost hundreds of written statements, boxes of tapes. The walls are still blackened with scorch marks, and it smells strongly of smoke and blood, although Martin doesn’t think anything literally bled in this room. But the fire was a terrible blow to the Eye, struck at them by the Lonely, and standing in the open wound gives them a head start in striking back. 

Basira draws a chalk circle in the middle of the floor, the rest of them rearranging the remaining boxes so she has space. She consults her notes as she works, and the circle becomes a stylized eye, exactly like the one on Martin’s wrist.   
  
“I don’t, um,” one of the university friends Georgie Barker dug up says uncertainly, looking deeply weirded out, “I’m--what is this, again?”  
  
“Told you,” Georgie says, her voice high but implacable, “It’s for Jon.” Martin can’t help but notice her fingering the necklace around her throat--the one she says used to belong to Jon’s mum. Apparently he gave it to her years ago and wouldn’t accept it when she tried to give it back. Martin stamps down hard on his own jealousy, reminding himself that if Jon still has feelings for his ex, that’s going to _help_ .  
  
“Uh,” the friend says again, and exchanges a wary look with one of the other people Martin doesn’t recognize. “All right?”  
  
At the outer edges of Basira’s chalk Eye, Melanie has, as promised, assembled every possible human connection Jonathan Sims has ever had. There’s Georgie, standing with three unlikely people from Oxford who apparently still think of Jon fondly, or who Georgie is pretty sure Jon regrets having lost touch with, a baffled-looking academic from St Andrews who did his masters with Jon and was still in Jon’s phone--Daisy did the interview with him, and she thinks he’ll be useful, anyway--and then of course there’s Daisy herself, a determined expression on her face. She also has a picture of Tim in her hand. It’s the terrible one from the Institute website, but--it’s Tim, and Martin’s heart throbs a bit in his chest. Melanie’s next to her, and she’s carrying a little notebook that she can’t show to any of them, but that she says contains everything she remembers about the first Sasha James. When Basira finishes, she steps back to the edge of the circle, between Daisy and Melanie, and accepts the framed picture Melanie gives her, the one they found in Jon’s flat, of his grandmother. She gives Martin a careful nod, and switches on the tape recorder in her free hand.  
  
Martin draws in a slow breath, centering himself as best he can, and then goes to help Elias down the stairs, to the center of the eye.  
  
Elias nods his head. “Nearly,” he says to Martin, approving. “Very nearly.” He raises his voice slightly, to encompass the whole room. “As to the rest of you, a great deal more than just one man’s life is at stake tonight. All your lives, for one thing.”  
  
One of the uni friends makes a disbelieving noise, and Elias tilts his head in her direction. She instantly quiets. “Once the ritual begins,” he says, silky and utterly persuasive--oh, because he’s implanting the truth of it in their heads, isn’t he, everyone who doesn’t already belong to the Eye-- “You will be still, and you will be silent. Any interruptions would be. Hm. Unpleasant, for anyone involved. Which does mean all of you.” He smiles, pleasantly. “Thank you again for volunteering.”  
  
“That’s enough of that,” Martin interrupts him, and Elias’s grip on his arm tightens briefly. He looks around at all of them, open and pleading. “We’re all here because we--we care about Jon, in one way or another--so if you could just focus on that, no matter what happens. Just think about Jon, and your feelings for him, especially when it--if it gets--bad,” he says, voice trembling slightly, “That would be, just, really helpful. We’re, um. We’re all he has, so--please. Just--think of Jon, all right?”   
  
“We’ve got it,” Daisy drawls, and there’s a little ripple of feeling around the circle, like a living thing. Martin lets out a shaky exhale.  
  
“Okay,” he says, and reaches for the book in his pocket. It’s _Martin the Warrior_ after all--they’re hoping because Jon chose it, it’ll be more helpful than the other options.  
  
Elias stops him with a brief shake of his head. “I have something better,” he says.  
  
“You’re changing the plan _now,_ ” Martin asks incredulously, but then Elias produces a book from the inside pocket of his jacket, and when Martin gets a look at the title all the air goes out of his lungs.  
  
It’s a smooth little paperback, with with a grey matte cover. In gold writing, it reads:  
  
_ways to save the world_  
  
_Poems by Martin K. Blackwood_  
  
“I, I never published this,” Martin whispers, but he takes the book. He skims the pages, and of course they’re all really his. There are things in here he barely remembers writing, things from years ago, before he even really knew Jon. It’s hideously embarrassing, and--Martin thinks of Jon touching them, and his heart tries to beat its way out of his chest.  
  
“I’m aware,” Elias says, oily and avuncular. “I took the liberty of having it printed up for the occasion. Go on.”  
  
Martin darts a helpless glance to the circle, and Basira shrugs, looking angry but resigned. “Might as well go for it,” she says. “The bastard would know.”  
  
“Yes,” Elias says. “He would. Now let’s begin.”  
  
Martin places the book in the chalk pupil of the Eye, and he can feel something springing into place as he does it, like loading a trap, or a gun.  
  
“Good,” Elias says softly, and unties his own blindfold, baring the half-healed wreckage of his eyes. There’s a stifled gasp from someone in the circle, but Martin doesn’t dare look. “Give me your hands, Martin.”  
  
They are standing in the chalk iris, the book and the pupil between them, at their feet. Martin offers Elias his hands, palm-up, and Elias loops his blindfold around them like a scarf and loops the ends around his own hands, like a horrible parody of a handfasting. The blindfold is taut between them, and Martin can see little smudges of Elias’s blood staining the fabric. He shudders.  
  
“You were a weapon in the hands of the Forsaken,” Elias says, quietly poisonous. “You were used to blind the Ceaseless Watcher, to blister the the Great Eye, to mar the truth of what is Known. Do you regret it?”  
  
Daisy makes a small sound, and Martin shakes his head hard, but doesn’t look away from Elias. “No,” he says.  
  
“What would you give,” Elias asks, “to bring back my Archivist?”  
  
Whatever you like, Martin wants to say, wants to be brave for just a little longer, but he can’t manage it. He thinks of saying _anything_ , but it isn’t true. Jon wouldn’t want it to be true. He looks down at the little gray book and says: “My eyes. My tongue. My heart.” 

“Your life?” Elias prompts him.  
  
“Yes,” Martin says. Hasn’t he already?  
  
“Show me,” Elias demands, and the scar on Martin’s wrist goes white-hot, so abrupt that his knees nearly buckle.  
  
The scar is opening up like a fresh wound. Blood drips down from Martin’s wrist to the book, and the scent of ozone fills the room. There’s a crackle like lightning, like static, and then--  
  
the Eye on the floor flares open, and the book tumbles into it. The pupil suddenly glows white hot and widening under their feet so both Martin and Elias have to step quickly back, the scarf spooling out between them. The pupil is shining like a beacon, and there are little glowing threads from the rest of the circle feeding it, emerging from everyone’s chests like the threads in Jane Eyre to descend into the eye, and, and maybe _through_ it.  
  
It’s too bright to look at for long, but for an instant Martin thinks he can see a faint shape that might be a man, and his heart leaps. Please, he prays, although he doesn’t know to who. Please, please work.  
  
The figure in the light turns away, and a cold pit opens in Martin’s stomach.  
  
“Archivist,” Elias orders, cold with command, “Open the door.”  
  
“Jon,” Martin says aloud, helpless and still bleeding, the wound no longer dripping but streaming into the Eye, feeding it directly, “Jon, _please_.”  
  
“Archivist,” Elias says again, vicious, and Martin can tell from the strain in his voice that it isn’t working.  
  
The glowing circle starts to contract, and Martin doesn’t even think--he yanks his hands out of Elias’s grip and falls to his knees. He shoves his bleeding arm into the slowly closing portal, and reaches out as hard as he can.  
  
It, um.  
  
It hurts.  
  
Martin squeezes his eyes shut and concentrates, doing his best to ignore Elias and the pain and the sudden clamor of the circle around him, just--holding out his hand. He thinks about Jon kissing the hollow thing with his face, about Harry Potter and _Martin the Warrior_ and bloody Keats and the endless months of missing Jon, the awful years of worry and want. _Though I am old with wandering_ , he thinks, near the end of his strength, _through hollow lands and hilly lands_ \--

But it was all worth it, wasn’t it, because just when he thinks he can’t bear it any longer, he feels a hand take his.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought this would be the last chapter, but we're gonna have one more part. 
> 
> Comments make me happy <3


	5. Chapter 5

Martin keeps sending the books.  
  
It’s horrible--worse, Jon thinks, staring down at a thick copy of _War and Peace_ with jealous longing, than if Lukas had stopped them coming at all. It’s like getting a present without being allowed to open it, or knowing you have mail but not being able to check it. That is, if the letter in your mailbox were the last words the person you loved might ever say to you and the present was the last gift you might ever receive, if you knew for certain there was no joy left in the future. The part of Jon that he supposes was always drawn to the Eye is maddened by not being able to _know_ , but no matter what he does, Martin manages to find him, and the books stack up. _Spinning Silver. Don’t Call Us Dead. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. Jane Eyre_. 

In addition, with nothing to read, and the continued silence of the television and radio, Jon is increasingly bored, and frightened by his boredom. The Entities punish complacency. 

He’s so distracted by his own boredom, in fact, that it takes him a while to notice when he starts to lose things.  
  
The first thing he notices is his favorite coffee shop.   
  
At first he just thinks he’s absently overshot it--he must be only a block or so away. It’s the same coffee shop he went to most mornings before he arrived at the Archives, and since he’s been cut off from the world it’s the coffee shop he goes to whenever he’s given up on sleeping, making himself an inexpert latte from the still and silent machines, sitting alone at the bar to drink it. He’s found it comforting that the taste, at least, was the same, between his old life and his new life.  
  
Jon doubles back a block, but finds himself on a frustratingly familiar street, the shop still nowhere in sight. He circles the area for an hour before he gives up, unsettled. It’s not that the shop isn’t there--there’s no abandoned storefront where it should be, or anything like that--but he can’t seem to-- _know_ where it is, any longer. Jon glances at the copy of Mary Oliver’s _American Primitive_ that appeared in his flat this morning, stacked on top of the books Jon obviously hasn’t touched in weeks, and tries to brush the cover with his fingers. The book is still there, but his hand passes right through it. It’s obvious which thing is real and which thing is lacking.  
  
It’s like that, he thinks. The cafe is probably still there, but he’s been prevented from finding it. The more he concentrates on the cafe, in fact, the less he can remember about it: what was the name? Something Brothers? South something? The interior had a lot of dark wood--unless it was black tile?--and there were plants in the corners. Unless that was the Caffe Nero by his flat?  
  
By the next afternoon, Jon can’t even remember if it was a latte he made every morning, or if it was an Americano with an extra shot. Didn’t that sound more like him?   
  
He tries not to think about it, which is probably compounding the problem, but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t think about it when he loses his favorite pub either. Or the Thai place he knows is just around the corner from his flat but is now completely inaccessible, and the curry place he got takeaway from so often they used to have his order by heart. He can’t even find his neighborhood Tesco one day, and actually tears at his hair in frustration, wandering the empty street--does the Forsaken want him to _starve_? Is that how it plans to end him?  
  
“Can’t even find a ready-made sandwich,” Jon mutters to no-one, exhausted from walking himself in circles around the block he knows the store should be on, his eyes hot with frustration. “What am I supposed to do, then? What am I supposed to do?” 

He finds a vending machine still accessible inside the lobby of an unfamiliar building, drags himself home with a packet of crisps and a water bottle.   
  
He still sleeps, but he hasn’t been dreaming. At first he was relieved--no more nightmares, no more waking up half-horrified and half-horrifyingly sated, no more victims to feed the Eye--but now the emptiness of his own head has started to feel like an extension of the echoing silence of his waking world, and he thinks almost longingly about the nightmares he used to have, the Presence that never really left him alone.  
  
When he catches himself thinking like this, Jon always eventually reminds himself that this is why he deserves it.   
  
The morning Martin leaves him _Beloved_ by Toni Morrison--Jon marks its silent appearance on his coffee table with a dull pang--Jon leaves his flat for the last time.  
  
It’s gone when he tries to find his way back at the end of the day, no matter how long he looks. 

Jon almost goes back to the Archives just--just on reflex, really--but makes himself redirect. He winds up looking around the city for anything familiar, and finding only the generic London landmarks that anyone would know: Trafalgar Square, Westminster Abbey, the London Eye. Nothing personally significant; not Georgie’s favorite bar or the bookstore Martin first found him in or the bloody Waitrose that has the kind of tea he likes. It’s a tourist’s London, as bland as a “Keep calm and carry on” poster.  
  
He wanders into St Paul’s Cathedral, just because it’s a building he recognizes, somewhere he knows. He sits inside the vast, echoing interior, alone under the high, hollow ceiling, and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and shudders for a while.  
  
He’s very lonely, he realizes, and chokes out a laugh. It echoes oddly in the emptiness of the church. 

Eventually he realizes he can hear someone else breathing in the pew beside him, and jerks up, flinching hard at the sight of the Lonely, sprawled comfortably beside him.  
  
“Hi, Jon,” the Lonely says, with an easy nod of its head. “Fancy meeting you here.”  
  
“Not like I have much choice,” Jon replies, voice hoarse from lack of use. 

“Tch,” it says. “It’s only a place. I didn’t think you’d mind much.”  
  
It’s true that Jon was never particularly sentimental about the flat itself, or even really about his possessions: most of his furniture was inherited from his grandmother after she died, so it’s not like he’d chosen any of it. But it was _Jon’s_ , the place he’s crawled home to at the end of the day for almost ten years now, and he doesn’t--the only other places he knows to go are the Archives and--Martin’s flat, Georgie’s flat. He doesn’t want to go to the Archives and watch more books pile up, and he doesn’t think he could bear to go to Georgie’s flat and see it be empty, cat toys limp and abandoned on the floor. He doesn’t want to go to Martin’s home and see the books piling up. He just wants to rest.  
  
“Honestly it’s not a great sign,” the Lonely continues, with false sympathy. “What are you going to do when you start losing people?”   
  
Jon stares at it.  
  
It smiles at him, indulgent. 

Jon swallows, and his throat clicks. “Have--have you already--?” How would he know if someone was missing? How would he know who he’d forgotten?  
  
It makes a show of looking thoughtful, as if trying to remember. “Hmm,” it says. “No one you’d miss.” It winks. “Not yet.”  
  
Jon closes his eyes. This can’t go on forever, he reminds himself. Eventually this is going to end. Jonah Magnus found Barnabas Bennett’s bones: he had them inlaid into the wooden mosaic of Elias’s office floor. Jon remembers exactly how they’d looked: smooth and worn. That’s what’s awaiting him, and that isn’t so bad. It’s better than the end of the world.  
  
“You know, I’ve never been one for religion,” it says idly, “but I always liked the idea of lighting a candle for dead loved ones. Charming idea, isn’t it? To remember them by.”  
  
Jon finds himself standing before one of the displays of little red candles, a few of them still burning, without really making the decision to get up from the pew. There’s a long taper in his hands. Dead loved ones. He rushes through the list, worrying over any potential absences, people he might miss. There’s Tim, and Sasha--or, or his idea of Sasha, whether that was really her or not, and his grandmother, and his father, and--  
  
“There it is,” the Lonely says, sighing with satisfaction.  
  
“My mother,” Jon says, and his voice comes out strangely.  
  
“What color were her eyes?” it asks, its own eyes fluttering closed, pale lashes skimming its cheek.  
  
Jon doesn’t know.  
  
“What about her hair?” it whispers hungrily, and Jon doesn’t know that either. He doesn’t know what she looked like at all, even though he knows there was a photograph of his parents in his bedroom his entire childhood growing up. Even though he knows he used to sing the lullabies she sang him as a small child every night before he fell asleep, the entire first year he lived with his grandmother, out of fear of forgetting them.  
  
“What was her name?” it asks, and groans very softly when Jon can’t answer, worrying hopelessly at the hole in his memory where his mother should live.  
  
“Good, Jon,” it says eventually, when Jon realizes he’s shaking too badly to replace the candle taper, and lets it drop to the ground instead. It sounds lazy, sated. “Very good. And think! You hadn’t thought of your mother in ages. What happens when you forget someone you actually love?”  
  
It vanishes before Jon can protest that he did love her--that he had loved her--or he thought he had. He must have.  
  
But how would he know? 

*  
  
Jon doesn’t stay in the Cathedral. He can’t bear the sight of the flickering red candles.  
  
He sleeps in the British Library for a few nights, curled uncomfortably in a corner of the gift shop with a commemorative sweatshirt for a pillow, and realizes that the books have stopped coming. Martin either can’t find him--or he’s stopped looking.  
  
Jon tells himself he’s glad. He’s relieved, really. This is better for both of them.  
  
London keeps shrinking. The fog takes more of it every time Jon thinks to look.  
  
It’s horribly ironic, he thinks, a fitting way for the Archivist to die: carving out new holes in his memory, making the world he can know smaller and smaller.  
  
He tries not to--think about anyone, in particular. He’s afraid that thinking too much about someone will mark their memory out for deletion. He actually tries some meditation techniques, things he learned from skimming the surface of Melanie’s mind without actually meaning to. They work a bit, but not enough: for as many hours as he can spend not thinking about people, there’s always some moment in every day where he realizes he’s lost something else.  
  
Someone else.  
  
There’s a poem, he thinks: not one of the ones Martin sent him, but something he must have read in school when he was younger. He doesn’t remember the author, but he remembers the refrain, which came back again and again: _the art of losing isn’t hard to master_. Jon tries to get better at losing. He tells himself this is ultimately a kindness, even if it does feed the Forsaken in the moment. You can’t miss what you don’t remember, after all.  
  
But he can’t stop himself from feeling the gaps in his memory, the absences where he knows something important used to live. Mother, father, the boy who was taken by Mr. Spider instead of him, the monster who lived behind the yellow door, the assistant Sasha used to flirt with, the woman Daisy talked about in the coffin, the one she wanted to make it back to.  
  
Every time he accidentally finds himself thinking about someone he does remember, someone he’d rather not forget--his grandmother, Daisy, Melanie, Georgie, Martin--he finds himself trembling with panic, grief and dread twined together into a kind of strangling rope that makes him unable to draw in enough air.  
  
He tries confronting it dead on, after a while, by writing important things down, but it doesn’t help. He spends an afternoon furiously writing in a memo pad while tucked into the McDonalds on the Strand, and then flips back over his work the next day and finds one of the entries totally devoid of meaning.  
  
(Melanie King used to have a show on Youtube, and she was Georgie’s friend, and she tried and failed to abandon the Eye, and she had black hair and a tattoo on the back of her neck, and Jon apparently once did surgery on her leg? That doesn’t even make sense. Is the Lonely replacing his writing, somehow?)  
  
Even looking at the lists he’s drawn up of people he does remember frightens him. He’s terrified of waking up to find Georgie reduced to a scribbled paragraph in a notebook:  
  
_Georgina Barker_  
-called Georgie   
 -your first girlfriend who you met at Magdalen.   
-the first person to ever say she loved you, after your parents, probably .   
-you adopted a cat with her. He’s called The Admiral. He is six and a half pounds of pure fluff fully grown, and you honestly still miss him.   
-touched by the End.   
-you fed on her trauma in your dreams for years because she gave you a statement. She isn’t afraid of you, but she’s never forgiven you.  
-she shouldn’t.  
-brown corkscrew curls, freckles on her nose, small nailbitten hands. You always thought she was very beautiful.  
 -you loved her, actually, although you couldn’t bring yourself to ever tell her so.  
 -she loves Hungarian food, chips, pizza, American tv shows, ghost stories, the Admiral, her friends.   
-she is a good person.  
  
He can’t bear to write even that much about Martin. 

He gets as far as the name on the page-- _Martin Blackwood_ \--and then has a panic attack. When he can finally breathe again, he finds himself praying, like there’s anything listening, or anything that doesn’t mean him harm: let Martin be last. Please let Martin be last.  
  
*  
  
The fog swallows up the British Library after just a few days of sleeping in its gift shop, and then the British Museum and Covent Garden a few days after that. The fog chases Jon across Central London over the course of two weeks, enveloping the National Gallery and Big Ben and then finally Westminster Abbey, until he finds himself herded back into Pimlico, as much by necessity as instinct.  
  
The Institute is a small building, but Jon still gets the sense that it is still the only thing left standing in the empty world. The last place in the world for Jon Sims to go.  
  
When Jon steps through the doors, he feels something in him go taut and then loosen, like somewhere inside him a string has finally been cut.  
  
It’s oddly freeing. 

Jon walks through the familiar halls, wondering vaguely if Elias knows he’s there. He might: he was always better than Jon at seeing through rival powers. But there’s nothing Elias could actually do, is there? Not that he would. The Watcher isn’t one for intervention.  
  
He visits Elias’s office anyway, mostly to look again at what remains of Barnabas Bennett, the worn-down scraps in the floor mosaic, beautiful in a tired Victorian way. The grandfather clock ticks soundlessly above Elias’s desk, and Jon glances briefly down at the papers covering it. They’re all blank. Maybe Elias will claim his bones too, eventually. Jon thinks that might be--restful, perhaps.   
  
(He still remembers Elias. He thinks when he has forgotten Elias, he will have forgotten himself.) 

He leaves Elias’s office, wanders down the familiar halls to the empty Archives. He thinks in a way it’s inevitable that he’d wind up back here. He’s been worried that he’d die here for years. At this point it might simply be a relief.  
  
Jon eats a stale biscuit from the tin in the break room, makes himself a terrible cup of tea in a mug that used to belong to--that used to be--a mug he sort of recognizes. He wanders into the bullpen. The desks are covered in papers, and it bothers Jon that he no longer remembers who each desk belongs to. He knows he should know that.  
  
The wind is relentless even here, of course, so he isn’t warm when he curls up on the cot in document storage, but there’s something warming about the idea of it, of sleeping somewhere he’s slept before. Of being somewhere like home, even if it’s awful.  
  
When he wakes up, there’s a book resting on the pillow beside him. A children’s book, the title shiny with red foil, an illustration of a mouse waving a sword on the cover.  
  
Jon can’t think why anyone would have put a book there. Maybe someone else was using the cot, in the other world, and fell asleep reading? It seems like a stretch.  
  
He tries to lift the book, get a better look at it, and is surprised to find that his hands slide away from it, as though it were insubstantial. Is this a new trick of the empty world? Is he going to be able to touch fewer and fewer things now?  
  
There’s a little shiver of something--not quite a sound, but a physical awareness that he is no longer alone--and Jon realizes that the Forsaken is sitting on a stack of boxes across the room.  
  
“They’re trying to find you,” it says, amused.  
  
“Who are?” Jon asks, wary, and it smiles.  
  
“The people who care for you most on this earth,” it says, chiding. “Don’t you remember them, Jon?”  
  
Jon blinks, tries to focus. He thinks about the notebook in his pocket, the list of names of people he can’t remember. “You mean, ah, Elias,” he says, fumbling at his jacket pocket one-handed. “He doesn’t care for me, you know. He just wants me to end the world.”  
  
The Lonely smiles. “Well. Don’t we all.”  
  
Jon can’t find the notebook. Maybe he’s misplaced it, or it’s one more thing lost to the fog.  
  
“I have to say,” the Lonely continues. “I knew Martin would make us a feast, but I didn’t think he’d go to _this_ much effort. Ten different hopes all dashed at once! Peter was right about him after all.”  
  
Jon remembers Peter. He thinks he remembers an assistant cutting Peter’s throat. He had hated Peter, he thinks vaguely, but can’t recall why.  
  
The Lonely inhales slowly, savoring whatever is happening in the other world. “Look at them,” it says dreamily, its attention fixed on something invisible in the center of the room, although of course as far as Jon can see the room is still empty.  
  
The book on the pillow catches his attention again. With an odd start, he realizes it’s not the same book it was before. It’s become a smooth paperback, dark and grey in color. In simple gilt lettering, he reads:  
  
_ways to save the world_ _  
_ _Poems by Martin K. Blackwood_  
  
Jon wonders which world Martin K. Blackwood was trying to save.  
  
Forgetting that he can’t touch things now, Jon reaches out and picks up the book, lifting it easily into his hands.  
  
The Lonely draws in a sharp breath, and Jon automatically flips the book open.  
  
It bursts into light.  
  
Shocked, Jon drops the book, and it becomes a door.  
  
It--it makes _noise_ , the first thing in months and months to have made any sound at all, and it’s almost too much for him to bear. He can’t stop himself from clapping his hands over his ears as the door explodes with sound, a chorus of strange voices calling out to him, demanding and urgent.  
  
It’s a violent cacophony, overlapping voices like--like _statements_ , a frozen part of Jon’s brain observes, like tape recorders crowded on the lid of a coffin, like the hungry chaos of his nightmares.  
  
The Lonely is saying something, its mouth moving, eyes black, but Jon can’t hear it: there’s too much noise.  
  
Then Elias’s voice cuts through the rest, clear and cold: “Archivist. Open the door.”  
  
_Archivist,_ Jon thinks, and the truth of it burns into him, no longer hidden by the Forsaken’s tricks: _I am the Archivist._  
  
He forces himself to look through the door, his eyes watering and hands still pressed to his ears, and sees Elias looking back at him, only his eyes are terrible wounds. Elias smiles, and Jon remembers the weight of the crown in his hands, unspeakable truth after unspeakable truth filling his mind so completely that there was hardly anything left of Jon at all--he remembers the Archivist like an absence, the Archivist like a hollowing hunger, and he gasps with how much he throbs after it, how much he wants to commune again with the Eye that fed him.  
  
But it has been months and months since Beholding has been able to touch him. He has been Jonathan Sims--just Jonathan Sims--for months and months.  
  
_This is why you deserve it,_ Jon reminds himself viciously, biting his own tongue until it bleeds. _The Watcher’s Crown is not for you._

He squeezes his eyes shut, and feels more than hears the Lonely laugh with delight, a little chill ache in the air.

“Archivist,” Elias says again, angry, but he can’t reach Jon now, even after he instinctively opens his eyes again. The Lonely is standing just behind the impossible door, smiling broadly as the portal starts to contract.  
  
The fever pitch of noise gets louder, and one of the shouting strangers shoves Elias aside, a terrible look on his face that Jon can’t quite understand.  
  
“ _Jon_ ,” the stranger cries out, and thrusts his arm through the closing window, his hand outstretched.  
  
Jon stares at the outstretched hand, his heart pounding with adrenaline. It’s a normal hand, although every finger is flexed, straining towards him, and the man--whoever he is--is bleeding from some kind of shallow cut on his wrist--his palm is slick with blood. The sound is finally subsiding as the window irises closed, but he can still hear the stranger’s voice as he whispers through the gap: “Jon, _please_.” 

“Come on,” the Lonely says softly. “You’ve already made your choice, haven’t you? You deserve me.”  
  
And it’s true, Jon knows it’s true, and he doesn’t know what the stranger wants from him, what they’re _asking_ of him--  
  
\--but the hand flexes again, a tendon in the man’s wrist suddenly visible with effort, and it’s been so long since Jon touched anyone. It’s not the same as going through the door, is it, if he just wants to touch someone again, even though it makes him weak.  
  
“Jon,” the Lonely repeats warningly, but Jon ignores it.  
  
He jerks forward and takes the stranger’s hand, and   
  
the world falls away.   
  
*  
  
When Jon opens his eyes, he is no longer standing in the Archives. He’s in a white and featureless fog, nothing under his feet and nothing above him, the cold of it gnawing at his skin. He gets the sense that he’s been here before, although he can’t think when.  
  
He isn’t alone.   
  
The stranger with the bleeding hand is standing just a few feet from him, visibly trembling.  
  
The Lonely is talking quietly to him, the stranger’s face cupped in one of its broad hands. “--miss it,” it’s saying intently, and Jon realizes with an unpleasant lurch that the Lonely looks more like Peter Lukas than it has in months, although the features still aren’t quite right. “We could always take you back.”  
  
“What is happening,” Jon demands curtly, hunching in defensively against the raw air.  
  
The stranger makes a choked sound and lurches towards him, pushing the Lonely aside. Jon takes a few quick steps back, his heart beating in his throat.  
  
The stranger stops in his tracks, visibly swallowing. “Jon?” he asks, voice cracking.  
  
“Who are you?” Jon asks, shuddering with cold.  
  
The stranger sucks in a breath. “Don’t you know me,” he asks.  
  
Jon tries to know, but there’s nothing there. He shakes his head stiffly.  
  
“I told you,” the Lonely says in a lazy tone. “There’s very little of him left.”  
  
“We will take him,” the stranger tells it angrily, flushing a dull red. “Even if there were nothing left, we would take him.”  
  
“It’s not that simple, Martin,” the Lonely sighs. “Didn’t I give you exactly what you wanted? We saved the world, and Jon is perfectly safe. I don’t intend to let him die of anything less than old age. I even let you go.”  
  
“You gave me everything I asked for,” the stranger--Martin?--agrees bitterly. “Still not leaving him with you.” 

“That’s not very fair of you,” the Lonely murmurs, all the more dangerous for its softness. “I never took you for a dealbreaker.”  
  
“I’m not breaking anything,” Martin tells it, scrubbing at his face. “Didn’t I give _you_ everything you asked for? I left him alone, I let you-- _i_ _nto_ me, and we stopped the Watcher’s Crown. Deal bloody well _fulfilled_.”  
  
“You w-what?” Jon grits out, but both of them ignore him.  
  
“Don’t pretend like you’re not at a disadvantage,” Martin continues, soft and savage. “The counter-ritual _exists_ now--we’ve brought that much into the world. Do you want us to share with the class? Let the Fairchilds and the Desolation start opening doors to the empty world whenever they feel like it?”  
  
“Careful,” the Lonely breathes.  
  
“You’re going to let me leave with him,” Martin says, “Or I am personally going to re-open every Lonely statement in the Archives with living family--and just _see_ how many we can poach out from under you.”

“What,” Jon manages from between his chattering teeth, “--are--you--talking about?”  
  
“I’m getting you out of this place,” Martin says to him, not looking away from the Lonely. “I’m taking you home.”  
  
“It appears that we need a new deal,” the Lonely says, with a slow blink that Jon finds horrifically ominous. “Stakes?”  
  
“No more deals,” Martin says, but his voice shakes when he says it. “You just let us go.”  
  
“ _Martin_ ,” the Lonely says, warning.  
  
“I love him,” Martin snaps, and then sort of full-body flinches as he turns to Jon. “I love you,” he repeats, desperate, and the words hit Jon like blows. “And you love me. You--you said.” He sounds afraid.  
  
“I don’t know you,” Jon says, and his heart is beating so hard in his chest that it actually hurts.  
  
“Doesn’t matter,” Martin says, and takes another little step towards him, so focused Jon thinks it’s probably involuntary. “You don’t have to know me. I know you, okay? You’re Jon Sims. You like cats and you hate spiders. You work too much, and you--you hate Keats. You are loved, and you--you love Georgie, and Daisy, and--E-Elias, and--Basira, and me. And maybe Melanie? And your friends Rose and Alex and Dave from university? You are _protected_.”

Jon is so cold, and so tired, and he hurts so much, his throat and lungs tender with frost. Every word sears through him, truths he doesn’t understand but desperately hungers after. He sways on his feet.

Martin catches him.  
  
He is taller than Jon, and much more solid--next to him Jon would feel almost insubstantial, except that Martin’s hands are firm and warm on his skin and it makes Jon feel more real instead, like Martin’s body is some kind of anchor.  
  
“I’m very tired,” Jon admits, hoarse, and Martin’s face sort of half-crumples before he takes a deep breath in, gathering himself.  
  
“See,” Martin says softly. “He doesn’t belong to you.”  
  
Jon has almost forgotten the Lonely, and jerks his head up to look at it.  
  
The Lonely is watching them, unreadable. 

Jon fists his hand in the fabric of Martin’s shirt, soft cloth warmed by the body of a person he doesn’t remember, and says without really knowing why: “Let us go, Evan.”  
  
Martin goes still at his side, and then adds: “She’s all right, you know. She’s going to be all right.”  
  
There’s a very long and wintry silence.  
  
Then the Lonely whispers: “Take him.”  
  
Martin doesn’t hesitate, folding Jon properly into an embrace, his hands tight on the back of Jon’s head and the small of his back, holding Jon to him as tightly as he can. Jon’s skin is prickling painfully, his whole body pins and needles, like he’s coming awake.  
  
“I missed you,” Martin says into his hair, high and hurt, “I missed you so much.”  
  
“Sorry,” Jon says mindlessly, with no real idea what he’s apologizing for. “Sorry, sorry.” He presses himself even closer to Martin, squeezing his eyes shut. It feels like something in him is being tugged at, like a dozen strings in his chest are all simultaneously being pulled tight.  
  
For a long instant he feels weightless, like he’s nowhere except held tight to Martin’s chest.  
  
Then they land hard, and Jon finds himself in Document Storage, a half-burned book under his feet, and Martin Blackwood in his arms.  
  
_Martin Blackwood_. How could he have ever forgotten?  
  
“Oh,” Jon says faintly, an instant before the shouting starts up again.  
  
Martin makes a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob, and Jon fumbles for his hand, holding it tightly.  
  
He doesn’t let go of Martin’s hand when Georgie launches herself into his arms, or Daisy, or Melanie. He keeps hold of him throughout all the embraces, all the overwhelming tears and noise and touch, the world almost agonizingly bright and real and loud and all around him. Martin doesn’t try to go anywhere, gripping Jon’s hand hard.  
  
Jon has no idea what he says to anyone, or what anyone says to him, except that Elias actually laughs before he leaves, requisitioning Alex from Magdalen's arm to guide him up the stairs, although Jon has no doubt that he’s still watching closely. 

Eventually Jon finds himself half-collapsed against Martin’s chest on the tired old cot in the corner, a lukewarm cup of tea in his hands, Georgie half-asleep sitting up next to him, then Melanie tugging her away and Daisy and Basira saying they’ll be right upstairs.  
  
“You saved me,” Jon says after a long while, his voice an exhausted croak. He’s warmer than he remembers being in his life, and it’s all he can do to keep his eyes open.  
  
“Told you I would,” Martin says, and he sounds almost as tired.  
  
“Twice,” Jon corrects, thinking about the Watcher’s Crown, and then frowns, thinking about 'The Song of Wandering Aengus' falling open in the bookshop at his feet. “More than that, even. You saved me a--lot,” he finishes, head lolling back onto Martin’s shoulder.  
  
“Thank you,” Martin says, and kisses the side of his temple, artless and weary. “For, um. Not dying?”

“Happy to oblige,” Jon says dryly, and is rewarded with a shattered laugh.   
  
“You should sleep,” Martin says, rescuing his tea before he can spill it. Then he kisses Jon again. This time Jon kisses him back, pressing his mouth to the nearest piece of Martin he can find--his shoulder--and Martin shivers. 

“Sleep,” Martin repeats softly, easing Jon’s head down onto his shoulder. "I'll be here when you wake up."   
  
And Jon does sleep.  
  
He is not alone in his dreams--not in the heart of the Eye’s seat of power--but his tie to the Ceaseless Watcher is frayed by months of neglect and failure. He is a weaker Archivist than he has been in years.  
  
When he finds himself dreaming about a woman running through a graveyard, he tries to cry out--and finds, for the first time since the dreams began, that he can.  
  
_Turn left,_ he calls to her, and she does, sobbing with relief as her feet finally find the road.  
  
It is only a very small thing. Two very small words, and the nightmare is so old, the grief so real and deep.   
  
But very small things, as Jon knows, are sometimes enough to save the world. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there we go. Dang, what an unexpected journey! Thank you all so much for your comments on this fic--they're quite literally why it's more than a thousand words of idle tragedy in a tumblr post <3

**Author's Note:**

> Come yell at me at wildehacked on tumblr if you are so moved


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